Professional 3D Accelerators Roundup (LightWave 7): May 2002

Part 3: Quantitative tests

Here we will estimate how the cards cope with the tasks. Performance
can be estimated objectively through the number of frames a card can render per
a unit time, which is a second here, i.e. through fps.

First of all I will briefly describe the scenes I used. I won't
give links because the scenes are very huge, even when archived. Besides, the
structure of the directories is very complicated, and I'm afraid of losing some
objects or images and including unnecessary things. Finally, all these scenes
come with the LightWave 3D 7, that is why those who already installed this packet
have them. I also had a wonderful idea of showing the rendered scenes to impress
you with their beauty, but I encountered several problems. If I render the scenes
in a low resolution, for example, in 320x200, you will hardly discern anything,
and in higher resolution the costs of rendering will be too huge, even on a 2
GHz processor, and an output file will also be quite great. I tried to code the
output file into divX, but there were some artifacts. If I find some good solution,
you will get an addition to this review :), and now I will show only several rendered
frames of the scenes.

Each scene was tested in two resolutions: 1280x1024 and 1600x1200
at 32-bit color. Our plugin ran the animation in this scene and then recorded
fps. Each scene was run at least three times, and after that arithmetic means
were recorded into the summary table (it prevented possible errors). Besides,
each scene was tested both with textures and in a wireframe mode to show a possible
difference.

And now look at the diagrams.

Hammer

First comes 1280x1024 in two modes:

It is interesting that the oldest accelerator has beaten the
latest cards. In the wireframe mode the situation is different.

And now a higher resolution in two modes:

It is unbelievable that the Quadro2 MXR is on a par with the
Quadro4 900 XGL in the texture mode. Again, the situation differs in the wireframe
one.

And now simply look at the diagrams.

MistyTrain

B17

GoldenGate_night

SpaceColony

This scene reminds me much of "Star Wars: Clone War". Maybe,
the creators of this movie used LightWave, but if it were so, they would hardly
distribute the scene from the movie with the program's distributive.

Blade

TindalosJump

At default this scene works in four projection windows. That
is why we carried out tests with animation right in 4 windows.

Bubbler

MechWalker_wFog

And the last diagrams concern operation of our three demo scenes:

SPACE

TOWN

VALLEY

Well, in the scenes containing a large number of polygons and
vertices but few light sources, the ATI's cards work better in the texture mode
irrespective of the resolution. In the wireframe mode the NVIDIA's cards perform
better. Besides, the old FireGL 2 has excellent scores. This is a really successful
card. The difference between the cards is small, which means that the most part
of load is laid on the system on the whole. Besides, in some scenes the cards
show equal results, which also proves my suggestions made in the beginning. LightWave
3D based on operation of plugins mostly loads a CPU and only partially GPU.